Archive for the ‘Marketing Automation’ Category

A CIO Takes On CMOs and Social Media Marketing

By Colin Osburn, Chief Information Officer at Parts.com

As a technologist, most everything I do has a technical bent first, with true ROI close behind. I realize that technology and finance to a marketer are like sunlight to a vampire, but steadily more and more of the marketing types appear to be following the technical and ROI trend. Metrics, reporting, automation, and justifying that mind-numbing campaign are all things that marketers are doing presently, while showing true technical aptitude.

I’ve had a real taste of why marketing and I are such distanced bedfellows. Running a national automotive parts Web site is complicated. A lot of technical effort goes into the operation and improvement of our search function, images, text, etc. Our customer base is earned through large partnerships, SEO (technical in its automation), and complimentary business lines. We even launched a short-run TV commercial this year for the first time in the company’s history.

It’s readily apparent that everyone—from small businesses to mega corporations and all the MLM shills in between—is jumping on the “new wave of technology” known as social media. To any decent technologist, this “new wave” is the same stuff we’ve been working with for years, but it’s in a new box with a bow.

All manner of Internet black magic that I can find, I heap upon our willing CTO to do a test run. I’m always looking at the newest technology for application to our business model. Automated sharing toolbars and widgets? Yep. Banner ads? Of course. Social media? Absolutely.

But I should have mentioned we do not have a CMO on staff. (Either that, or I disabled his account and forgot about him.) That means the technologists and sales executives are running the show. That also means we got exactly the results from all of these new implementations that you would expect:

  • The banner ads are completely pointless. I intend to remove them.
  • The toolbar never gets used, and no one shares anything.
  • The forums are dead.
  • We get very little response from our e-mail blasts.
  • We keep Facebook and Twitter because they keep the brand public. We also keep them because it’s a new type of customer service.

The Parts.com site is designed for commerce. We make money when someone buys an auto part. Pretty direct. We haven’t added articles and sticky reading-style content because our user base comes to our site for a very direct task and wants to do it quickly. The same people most likely do participate in auto enthusiast forums and spend a lot of time browsing “car porn” (photos of hot rods, tricked-out cars, and classic vehicles), but not while they’re buying a part. We also have a disproportionately large number of auto dealers who use our site, and the service manager isn’t interested in reading something while trying to get the customer’s part overnighted.

We have Facebook. We have Twitter. But I refuse to attach our brand to MySpace. We have hundreds of friends, and there are a lot of people talking about a lot of things, 99% of which involves the buying and selling of cars. It’s pretty damn hard to get people hot and bothered about a camshaft replacement or that hot new discounted windshield replacement. Have you figured it out yet? We’re not just commerce, but commerce as a subsection of a larger vertical. And that vertical has plenty of content and places that provide it. So we implement what we can as fast as we can and tweak, wait, watch, and adjust.

In reality, some key points came to light for me over the past year:

  • CIOs and CMOs need one another. That’s so painful to admit.
  • Marketing helps those awesome new technologies become ubiquitous.
  • If you don’t have a marketer on staff, this is a good time to start talking to your network.
  • Technology for technology’s sake works some of the time, but not enough to generate an ROI that keeps the monthly revenue high.
  • Content sites will almost always make more on the items I listed, from social media to banner ads. Commerce sites will overall make more on a direct revenue basis. Build a widget, sell a widget.
  • Commerce sites can make progress with these social media tools, but they should not bet projections on them.
  • Being a subcategory makes you look for the “why” a lot sooner. Dell and Ford kill it on social media and “new wave” commerce sales because they are the market. We sell parts. There’s a huge difference.
  • Take what you can get. Better customer service and communication has been a real win for us with these tools, even if we don’t make millions on banner ads.
  • The Get Satisfaction site is a real winner for us because it enabled us to learn from our customers what we need to know. (Facebook has helped us with that as well.)

To be continued…

Posted in Advertising, Banner Ads, Branding, CMOs, Colin Osburn, Content, Dell, E-Mail, Facebook, Finance, Ford, Forums, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Measurement, Metrics, MySpace, ROI, SEO, Tools, TV, Twitter | Comments Off on A CIO Takes On CMOs and Social Media Marketing

Social 3.0: Social Media Drives Demand Generation

By Brian Kardon, Chief Marketing Officer at Eloqua

Best-in-class companies have evolved beyond mere participation in social media. They have put a robust marketing technology platform in place that allows them to see how social media activities drive revenue. Social media is earning a seat at the revenue table. It’s called “revenue performance management.”

Social 1.0: Observe

Social 1.0 was all about curiosity. How interesting? What does it mean? What are the risks? Could social media (or “social computing” as my friends at Forrester called it in 2006) really take off?

Social 2.0: Act

Social 2.0 was about companies jumping in: tweeting, blogging, monitoring, and participating across social media platforms. “We should be doing this,” said an anxious CMO. “We will look cool.” “Look how ‘United Breaks Guitars’ or the ‘Comcast Sleeping Tech’ is killing them.” “We need an Old Spice viral idea.” “Hire a bunch of young people, stat!”

Social 3.0: Convert

Well, Social 3.0 is here, and it is about how social media is driving demand generation, adding engaged people to the database, nurturing their interest, and winning business. Yep, social media is driving revenue growth. It has evolved, matured. And it has earned a seat at the revenue table.

As CMO of Eloqua, I get to work with some of the most sophisticated marketing organizations in the world—companies like Adobe, American Express, and Sony. You may think “slow moving” or “bureaucratic.” Well, I can’t speak for everything these companies do, but in the world of social media, they have come to a remarkable place—faster than most would have expected. They have evolved to Social Media 3.0 in record time and are proving how social media drives revenue by:

  • Identifying “complaining” customers and resolving those complaints quickly, leading to higher retention rates
  • Identifying prospects who are shopping for a solution by their status updates or tweets (e.g., “Looking to switch brokerage account out of [competitor]. Any ideas?”) and responding through direct, helpful communications

Of course, most companies by now have set up processes to monitor the social environment. Best-in-class organizations have taken it to a whole new level by measuring and continuously tracking these people. For example, if someone is shopping in the category, they put them into a highly relevant nurturing program, score their progress, and pass the lead to the sales team at the right time. Then they track whether the prospects close or not, attributing the lead source to social media. In the case of complaining customers, they often put them into “remediation” nurturing programs to win them back. And, of course, they rigorously measure renewal rates of those in the remediation program.

From our experience, the companies that are proving social media’s contribution to revenue have five foundations in place:

  • Actively participate in all forms of social media
  • Have deployed a robust marketing and sales technology backbone, consisting of a CRM system, marketing automation, and social media monitoring
  • Have developed specific processes to deal with “complainers” and “active prospects”
  • Continuously measure and optimize the programs
  • Routinely report on social media’s contribution to closed business

Welcome to Social Media 3.0! If you are still in 2.0, it’s time to step up!

Posted in Brian Kardon, CRM, Customer Retention, Demand Generation, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Measurement, Metrics, Nurturing, Revenue | Comments Off on Social 3.0: Social Media Drives Demand Generation